The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon
"You don't need drugs to enjoy the Floyd. You need the Floyd to enjoy drugs."
- anonymous YouTube posting
Yes, I wrote a recent post about how the Flaming Lips were going to help restore music's respectability in the next decade. Yes, for all intents and purposes, they are still my favorite band putting out new material today. But why Lips, why did you have to start the decade off in the most unoriginal way possible, with a COVER ALBUM? And not just a cover album, you had to cover "DARK SIDE OF THE MOON", the most flawless forty-three consecutive minutes of musical perfection ever created. Tripped-out Wizard-of-Oz-loving college kids have probably lost more collective brain cells to this album than any other. There was no need for this travesty, and you know it.
Maybe I wouldn't be so fired up if I hadn't spent the last month and change, during the final edits for my book, listening to nothing - seriously, NOTHING - but early to mid-career Pink Floyd, non-stop. And in that time I've come to the conclusion that the Floyd were/are the most innovative, sonically adventurous, and lyrically superior band I've ever heard. (Interestingly, I made an almost identically bombastic observation about the Lips when I first started getting into them in '06) It's not that the Lips' versions of the individual songs are sub par, per se. A more uptempo, percussion driven "Breathe" is pretty kickass, the Lips' robot-synthesizer vocal effects are present - and pleasantly trippy - throughout, and Henry Rollins' spoken-word parts are maybe cooler than the originals. Stardeath and White Dwarves are a great up and coming group, and their presence is certainly felt, especially in "Time" and "Brain Damage". The point is that they're not just covering one or two songs and putting their own wacky spin on them. They're covering the entire "DARK SIDE OF THE MOON"! That's like taking a Jackson Pollock painting, buying the same color paints and flinging them onto an identical-size canvas in roughly the same splatter-patterns. No matter how "fresh" your new version might seem, there's a reason why the original sells for millions of dollars and yours looks like a three-year-old's finger-painting project. Because the Pollack is a unique masterpiece - not to be recreated.
In what can loosely be defined as Rock Music, there are a handful of classics that are not, under any circumstances, to be tampered with ("Sgt. Pepper's", "Astral Weeks", "Disintegration", and "Siamese Dream" come to mind). I would place "Dark Side" at or near the top of that list - along with every Pink Floyd release from 1967's "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" to 1979's "The Wall". Maybe the Lips' cover album is a big Fuck You to idiots like me who make lists of what albums aren't allowed to be covered. In that case, it's a giant waste of a Fuck You because the Flaming Lips wasted a lot of creative energy that they should have focused on crafting another one of their own masterpieces, along the lines of "Yoshimi" or "Embryonic".
With all that being said, I'm more than looking forward to checking out the Lips perform the entire album this summer at the Central Park SummerStage. Because as much as I fault them for attempting something as blatantly unattemptable as "Dark Side", I still understand that the psychedelic/prog rock torch has, for a couple decades now, been passed to them, that the Flaming Lips' originality and constantly evolving creative spirit is the closest we'll probably ever get to the mindfucking genius that was the Floyd.
Also, don't buy the Lips' "Dark Side" on iTunes. They don't need your ten bucks that badly. Get heady to the original.
